Wallace novel explores the not-so-boring desk life

There aren't many novels featuring white-collar work in America, and it's not hard to figure out why: Not much happens, and what does can be mind-numbingly boring.

But are those good enough reasons for ignoring the office, given that so many of us spend our adult lives working in one? What does it say about the (ir)relevance of our fiction when it doesn't have the guts - or just plain doesn't know how - to figure out what we do there, and how that makes us feel?

One of the late David Foster Wallace's many gifts - as well as his curse - was his constitutional inability to duck such questions, coupled with an unswerving commitment to seeing things as they really are.

It's therefore no accident that "The Pale King," the unfinished novel on which Wallace labored during the last decade of his life, is set in an office. And not just any office. Never one to do things by halves, Wallace chose the most boring workplace he could imagine: an IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill.

The plot, as described in one of his notes?

"Realism, monotony. Plot a series of setups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens."

What we get instead of plot, alongside some often deliberately dull descriptions of the work being performed, are the back stories of a number of IRS "wigglers" - the rote examiners who initially review a tax return.

Befitting the unfinished nature of "The Pale King," which includes many undeveloped fragments - some tantalizing and others surely headed for the dustbin, had Wallace lived - not all of these stories work.

But the overwhelming majority do, including the roughly one-third of the book given to two of them.

One, replete with those trademark Wallace footnotes, is about a character named "David Wallace," who sounds a lot like the dazzling but sometimes brittle author of "Infinite Jest."

The second involves one of the many characters in this book representing versions of who Wallace might have been: a thirtyish one-time drifter named Chris Fogle.

More mature and empathetic than his doppelgänger, Fogle views the Service - and even all of the boredom that goes with it - as an embodiment of his aspiration to a purpose-driven life.

In a brilliantly handled epiphany, the pre-IRS Fogle comes to see that he had been "too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn't actually real - I was free to choose 'whatever' because it didn't really matter . . . (and) through making this choice, I didn't matter, either. . . . If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free."

As Wallace repeatedly suggests, through similar stories involving other agents, what Fogle discovers is what it means to be an adult - which, in part, involves learning how to focus on a world beyond the prison house of the self, no matter how boring that outer world might seem.

"The Pale King" doesn't sugarcoat how the tedium of everyday life can crush the soul, and some of its most moving pages describe the terror and anxiety of lives lived as "fish thrashing in the nets of their own obligations" while the clock's second hand goes round and round.

But on the other side of boredom, Wallace suggests, is the realization, as expressed by one agent late in the book, that "almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting."

Including taxes.

"There's nothing more concrete than a tax payment," one agent reflects, making a tax return "one of the places where a man's civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms."

It's no accident that "The Pale King" is set in 1985, during dramatic tax policy changes that significantly enlarged what one agent calls "the holes that all the more selfish, glitzy, uncaring, 'Me-First' people are always making in the community."

Wallace fought to patch such holes all his life, and the very fact that he didn't finish "The Pale King" underscores the sense of failure that never left him.

How ironic and incredibly sad, then, that nothing Wallace wrote comes closer than this last, brave novel to showing us how, together, we might choose a different ending than the one that left him so alone.